Guido (JC Wells), a black drug dealer from Detroit, heads to Los Angeles to set up a big trade of weapons for drugs.
He employs local crooks Fay (Darlene Anders) – a predatory lesbian – and Ziggy (Russ Tamblyn) – a brutish, obnoxious loan shark and nightclub manager – to rip off a securities messenger, which will give him the $100,000 he needs to buy the munitions.
Following this caper is Shaft clone Kicks Carter (Timothy Brown) – a tough streetwise black Las Vegas cop – and his white partner Tony (Geoffrey Land).
When Tony is killed in a crash after a spectacular car chase, Kicks closes in.
After bedding sexy TV news reporter Stephanie (Tanya Boyd), Kicks calls for help from Alphonse (Al Richardson), his undercover ghetto contact, to set up a phoney munitions transfer with Guido in the desert.
Kicks and his men bust Fay’s operations, and Kicks fights Ziggy in a no-holds-barred hand-to-hand fisticuffs confrontation in a car junkyard, where Ziggy is violently killed.
At the munitions transfer in the desert, Kicks and his men take on Guido and his hoods. In a big car chase and desert shoot-out, Kicks knocks out the gang as Guido escapes in his plane.
With some (extremely) well-aimed shots by Kicks, he hits the plane igniting the explosives in it and blowing Guido to smithereens.
The storyline isn’t anything we haven’t seen from other Blaxploitation pictures, and the plot is as thin as an average TV cop show from the same period (albeit with added gratuitous sex, profanity and violence), but the cast is fun and some good villains help keep everything moving.
The movie hits its scuzzy nadir when a disgusting bunch of greasy, grinning slobs cheerfully gang rape luckless compulsive gambler Terry (Jana Bellan) – who had been Tony’s girlfriend – after she loses a poker game to them and doesn’t have any money to cover her loss.
The chick-a-boom soundtrack is as you would expect, and the eye-wateringly ugly ’70s clothes are every bit as laughably dated and ghastly as they ought to be.
Kicks Carter
Timothy Brown Ziggy
Russ Tamblyn Guido
JC Wells Terry
Jana Bellan Tony
Geoffrey Land Valerie
Regina Carrol Alphonse
Al Richardson Stephanie
Tanya Boyd Fay
Darlene Anders Narc
Jerry Mills Ramirez
Neal Furst Mad Bomber
Gavin Murrell Messenger
Gene Stowell
Director
Al Adamson
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When Tony is killed in a crash after a spectacular car chase, Kicks closes in.
The storyline isn’t anything we haven’t seen from other Blaxploitation pictures, and the plot is as thin as an average TV cop show from the same period (albeit with added gratuitous sex, profanity and violence), but the cast is fun and some good villains help keep everything moving.
Kicks Carter
